The Numbers Chat

The Date-Ruining Conversation You Need To Avoid Having

There comes a time in everyone’s life where we realize that metric principles don’t apply to romantic encounters. I remember walking around my local shopping mall as a 15-year-old horny boy with a group of four friends, battling it out to see how many girls we could get to look at us directly, and tallying up the totals over an under-aged beer later on. At the time, Axe was running a campaign where they would give away something called a ‘Clicker’ to customers who saved up enough vouchers, which we then used to keep track of how many girls we’d get. In the TV ad, Ben Affleck walked around, sipping coffee with his smug face, clicking away like every woman who looked at him had a vibrating egg popped in. That mentality stayed with me at least until I hit 20, but that is what being young is all about, and luckily for us older folk, we grow out of our young, dumb ideas.

If you are someone who asks, then it’s important to understand what you’re really looking for. What is the purpose of asking? What is the desired result? Where would you like to see the light lead at the end of this tunnel you’re dragging everyone through?

The type of person who is actually concerned about the precise number of sexual partners their date has had is someone who lives a life of constant judgments. What they really mean if they put this to you is, “Should I really be speaking to you?”

What we’re looking at here is a vetting process based on the most basic of details, stripping a person down to their bare bones, ignoring that they’re a complex character of intricate detail and difference, rather than simply a thing being surveyed. Someone who is interested in your identity — your traits and your life — wouldn’t have even considered asking, as they’re too busy getting lost in your world, which is so much more fun.

“People tend to partly adapt in their own ways and mirror what someone else’s character is like, so on the first encounter it’s hard to judge who someone is, anyway,” says Simon Winfield, a 28-year-old professional barber and model who’s not afraid to share that he’s been around the block a few times.

“I do think there is still an immaturity or slightly tabooed view around sex by some people as a crude act of filth, but I have noticed women have hugely changed in their approach to it since I started putting myself out there. We’re getting way more public, with things like Instagram proving a platform for both men and women to say, ‘Here I am, let’s just do it.’ For humanity’s sake, this is great because we’re all finally starting to act the way we want to.”

For us, as literate, smart men of the world, learning about someone’s background based on things like the number of sexual partners they’ve had just isn’t good enough. It shows a deep misunderstanding of how humans operate and a lack of self-awareness that strangles gender equality.

Some might argue that this question is about the need to relate, that it’s the same as asking someone ‘What do you do?’ to create a narrative about a person, to know if you’re going to connect. What someone does for money, in most cases, doesn’t usually have anything to do with who a person is.

But with the numbers chat, we have some kind of idea of what we want to hear. With sex, all we know is that we want to know — and how we’ll react is better left unknown.